1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a sensor data processing technology that is applied so that various service application programs that are used by using various user interfaces such as Web browsers and Voice XML browsers are allowed to process, in place of input from a user interface, sensor data read out by a machine as input from the user interface, and the result of the foregoing processing operation is displayed by the user interface.
2. Description of Related Art
The increasingly widespread use of the Internet and the progresses of the Web technologies have allowed users to acquire and use various types of information on the Internet from WWW (World Wide Web) servers by using Web browsers. Contents acquired from the WWW servers are described with a description language called “HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language)”, and the Web browsers interpret such information and display the same on screens.
Such Web systems have made evolutional development as Web application programs that not only simply acquire static contents on servers and display the same on screens, but also carry out information processing such as converting input data acquired from Web browsers into databases, etc., on the servers side, and based on the result of the foregoing information processing, dynamically produce contents and output the same to browsers. This development allows users to easily use various services on the Internet such as on-line shopping via the Web browsers.
On the other hand, companies have applied these Web technologies to business operations, thereby providing themselves with easy access to business systems via Web browsers, and various business systems have been constructed by using the Web technologies. The business systems, however, inevitably have problems of increases in operators' burdens, input errors, etc., due to manual input operations, since the data input to business systems via Web browsers is carried out by humans. To cope with these problems, systems for automation of data entry have been introduced, which are achieved by using reading machines to reading data such as barcodes and having output results displayed on Web browsers. Recently, with the progression of the RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) technology, systems using RFID tags in place of barcodes become used widely, with which the contents of tags are read out and notified to business systems.
Such a system is configured to use a scheme as follows: with a URL that tells a destination of data notification being embedded in a RFID tag (or a barcode), the URL is read out by a reading program in a reading device and a Web browser is instructed to display the read URL, whereby data notification to a service application program side is carried out. However, this scheme has the following drawback: since the URL telling the notification destination is embedded fixedly in the RFID tag, when the URL of the service application program is changed later, a necessity of rewriting all the contents of the RFID tag arises. Therefore, the following scheme is applied to an actual system: only business data such as an ID of an invoice are entered in a RFID tag (or a barcode), while information relating to a notification destination is registered on the reading program side, and the reading program side produces an actual URL according to the read data and the registered information on the notification destination, to instruct the Web browser to display the site at the URL.
It should be noted that, though not including a disclosure relating to a sensor device such as RFID, JP 2001-265680 A discloses the following configuration. A session identifier using media of a plurality of kinds such as E-mail, Web, and voice media is issued, and when a data transmission-reception part receives a processing request including a session identifier from a user through an optional medium, a medium interface converts the session identifier uniformly to usable data and delivers them to an integration management part. Then, the integration management part manages the session on the basis of the converted session identifier.
Here, the foregoing conventional system in which a RFID reading program generates a URL, however, has had the following problem: since information regarding the notification destination is embedded in the reading program, a service application program as a notification destination is fixed unchangeably. Therefore, in order that the service application program as a destination to which data in a RFID tag are notified is changed according to contents of a user's business, the destination information registered in the reading program side has to be re-registered every time.
Another problem is that as information read out is embedded in a URL and notified to a service application program, the service application program side has to know in advance the embedding method of the reading program so as to retrieve the embedded information. Therefore, a service application program to acquire data in a RFID tag has to revise its interface in compliance with the embedding method applied to the RFID tag.